Back in 1979, a celebrated Soviet epic, Siberiade, by director Andrei Konchalovskiy won the Gran Prix at Cannes. The narrative extended over several generations of Russians who had settled in neighbouring villages of Siberia, an expansive region undergoing huge historical transformations over several decades.

The film’s running time was close to five hours, yet almost no native inhabitants of Siberia appeared in it. There was a mystical ‘eternal man’ who would emerge from the primeval forest at seminal moments, make some wise pronouncements, and then disappear for decades, until the next appearance. And there was an episodic character, a ‘Hant’ hunter played by the Soviet Tuvan actor Maxim Munzuk.

Munzuk, who was born near the Soviet-Mongolian border, had been an established theatre actor in his native Tuva. In cinema, he mainly played supporting roles, usually as a member of a Siberian ethnic group (he could be cast as an Evenk, an Udege, a Nanai and so on). It might have stayed at that if it was not for the significant role of Dersu Uzala – a wise hunter who introduces a Russian explorer to Siberia – which Munzuk played in Akira Kurosava’s eponymous drama (1975), which was celebrated world-wide. Today, Siberiade is somewhat forgotten and, if it were to be remembered, it would be regarded as a work that glorifies settler colonialism as it puts an epic spin on the lives of Russians who started conquering these lands in the 16^th-17^th centuries whilst generally ignoring the natives. In contrast, Dersu Uzala remains one of Kurosawa’s most respected films and has gained renewed importance within the eco-cinema field.

The new book A Siberian History of Soviet Film: Manufacturing Visions of the Indigenous Peoples of the North discusses these filmic matters from the point of view of Siberia’s minorities. Here, Caroline Damiens explores the participation and the representation of the varied native inhabitants of Siberia in the cinema of the Soviet period. Originally published in French by the University of Rennes in 2023 (as Fabriquer la Sibérie soviétique à l’écran: une histoire filmique des peuples autochtones du Nord), it is based on the author’s 2017 dissertation. It won the BAFTSS award for best film book in 2025. It is an eye-opening study which lifts the veil over an area that has been researched deplorably little — and acknowledged even less. In that, it pioneers a field for research that has little inroads in the West so far and a great potential for further growth in Serbian and Soviet cinema.

Whilst it is generally known that the Soviet Union was a multicultural conglomerate that consisted of 15 constituent republics (of which Russia was just one), this knowledge rarely crosses-over into the academic field. Most of the scholarly studies published in the West focus on Russia. The cinema of the 14 other republics has been written about in a limited fashion, with only a handful of studies dedicated to it. However, besides the 15 republics, there were another 20 ‘autonomous republics,’ another eight ‘autonomous regions,’ and another ten ‘autonomous districts’ within the USSR, most of them within the Russian Federation. All of them had been formed around the nationality principle to ensure relative sovereignty for the multiple and varied minorities (of which there were more than thirty in Siberia alone). Besides some writing on the cinema of the Siberian republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and the Caucasus region of Kabardino-Balkaria, there is next to nothing in academic film studies to acknowledge this variety of traditions. Consequently, Damiens’ book will be a revelation to many, even as her study covers selected case studies. Indeed, it is impossible to discuss all the neglected multicultural aspects of Soviet cinema in one single work. Thus, the book is a pioneering atlas that maps new territories for future studies in the history of Soviet cinema and indigenous filmmaking. In it, Damiens outlines various ethnic minorities, the territories they inhabited and the access they had to filmmaking, the major phases which saw changing modes of representation; she also discusses about twenty representative films. It is a pioneering effort. And yet there is much more to do – there is no mention in the book, for example, of the work of Lennart Meri (1929–2006), the Estonian ethnologist whose films about ethnic minorities, of which The Winds of the Milky Way (1977) is best-known, were banned in the USSR, nor of the work of Buryat director Baras Halzanov (1938–1993) who made eleven feature films at the Sverdlovsk studios, all exploring ethnic minority lives. These and other omissions are not due to oversight but reflect the sheer size of the material that remains neglected in the Western study of Soviet cinema. Many more studies are needed to help overcome the Russo-centrism of existing scholarship and bring into the picture the multicultural diversity of the Soviet cinematic universe. A Siberian History of Soviet Film confidently paves the way for such undertaking.

Structuring the book in three parts, the author opts to highlight selected issues and periods from what is a potentially enormous — and not yet exploited — area of research. Part One looks at early ethnographic and expeditionary filmmaking, documentary and Kulturfilm. Already in the 1920s numerous visitors worked across remote corners of Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia. Many locals became involved in these projects in various capacities — as guides, informants, translators, actors, technical assistants —summed up by the term of ‘invisible co-authors’ (53) as they often did not receive much recognition by the film the author highlights details of their overlooked but important roles. Damiens’ focus is on the role of expeditionary practices (up to 1935) in the construction of indigenous representations of Chukchi, Chuvash, Kalmyk, Buryat, Sakha, Nenets, Evenk, Tungus, and others. It features a dozen early photographs which show the various native ‘co-authors’ in their various roles alongside the Russian expedition members, dissects the relationship of filmmaker-filmed, and discusses matters related to the Orientalist canon, such as ways of seeing, reenactments, modes of speaking, and other practices of ‘inventing’ the people of the Soviet North – all marked not only by the influence of Flaherty and Murnau, but also shaped by Lenin’s and Stalin’s pragmatic views on mobilising remote nationalities for the revolutionary effort. This first part, besides offering an analysis of explorer Vladimir Arsenyev’s works and of expedition shoots as ‘contact zones’, includes discussions of selected films (Igdenbu by Amo-Bek Nazarov, 1930; Sixth Part of the World by Dziga Vertov, 1926; Alone by Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1931).

The second part, covering the lengthy and uneven period between the 1930s and the 1970s, contains two chapters: one dedicated to the disappearance of ethnic actors from the Soviet screen, and one dedicated to the arrival of ecological consciousness in the discourse on Soviet modernity, which culminates in the Soviet-Japanese production Dersu Uzala (1975, a co-production of Mosfilm and Daei, directed by Akira Kurosawa). In the Stalinist period (roughly until the mid-1950s) and in the following years there is a marked retreat from efforts to involve indigenous collaborators. Indigenous people do feature on screen, mainly in fiction cinema, yet more often they are represented by actors of different ethnicities who happened to be available: such is the case with directors Mark Donskoy who was vocal about his reluctance to cast actors of a specific ethnic group. This part explores the work of travel filmmaker Vladimir Shneiderov, as well as Aleksandr Litvinov’s Girl from Kamchatka (1936), Mark Donskoy’s Alitet Leaves for the Hills (1949), Vitaliy Mel’nikov’s The Boss of Chukotka (1966), etc.

There may have been two adaptations of the 1923 memoir Dersu Usala (1961, 1975), but only the second one, by Kurosawa, is widely known. Accounting for the emerging ecological awareness, Damiens traces production decisions related to the resurrection of indigenous actors, who are no longer treated as a lost opportunity for civilization. Besides the Buryat extras, Munzuk plays the main role.

The third part is dedicated to attempts indigenous Siberian filmmakers made at reaching ‘visual sovereignty’ (1969–1982). It moves into the territory of television films, mainly made on order at specialised studios such as Ekran, where indigenous activism focused on language, casting and attention to ethnographic authenticity gradually emerges. The two, somewhat overlapping, chapters detail the work of native Chukchi screenwriter Iurii Rytkheu (1930–2008), but there is also extensive consideration of films by Anatolii Nitochkin (Tymancha’s Friend, 1969; When the Whales Leave, 1981), as well as of the role of actress and Evenk language teacher Zinaida Pikunova who becomes an outspoken cultural rights activist of the revivalist movement. This part also reports on efforts toward overcoming the Russian linguistic hegemony and raises the perennial issue of who films and who can speak.

In a context where most writing on Soviet cinema continues lavishing disproportionate attention to Russian themes, Damiens’ study charts a new territory where different directors, different films and different studios are in the centre of attention – thus reminding us of how obfuscated the diversity of the (allegedly) multicultural cinema of the USSR has become.

Luckily, there are other outstanding recent books that highlight obscured aspects of Soviet cinema, which directly compare with the work of Damiens – and which are abundantly referenced by her. I am thinking of Gabrielle Chomentowski’s study on Vostokkino (Filmer l’Orient. Politique des nationalités et cinéma en URSS, 1917-1938, Petra, 2016), of Oksana Sarkisova’s study on the early Soviet documentary and ethnographic cinema (Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia, I.B. Tauris, 2016) and of Cloé Drieu’s study on the early days of Soviet cinema in Central Asia (Cinema, Nation and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919-1937, Indiana UP, 2019). I strongly recommend all of them. Like the work of Damiens, they are meticulously researched and eloquently argued. They are truly decolonizing, too, in that they reveal the multiple ways in which the Soviet-endorsed Russo-centrism – political, narrative, and representational– was disadvantageous and diminishing for the minority cultures. I cannot help noticing, however, that the authors of these cutting-edge studies are based in Paris or Budapest and are alumni of universities in mainland Europe. One can speculate extensively why such research does not seem to be produced in the UK. One reason may be that the doctoral work on Soviet film is traditionally supervised is by Slavists specialized in Russian rather than (as is the case in France and generally on the continent) by academics specialized in anthropology, ethnography, film, geography and colonial historiography. After all, the Russian/Slavic field is still in the early stages of recognizing that there was such a thing as Soviet colonialism that may have somehow benefited Russians.

A Siberian History of Soviet Film formidably fulfils the task of decolonising, which studies in the field of Soviet cinema urgently need. There are no direct condemnations here; the text is marked by level-headed reporting that lets the readers draw their own conclusions. ‘Decolonisation’ is achieved through the choice of subject that casts light on some truly obscure corners of the history of Soviet filmmaking. Also, through moving the action away from Moscow and Leningrad, thus validating the lives, creativity, and efforts of people who worked in the vast hinterland of all those neglected republics, autonomous republics, regions and districts, inhabited by Russia’s ‘others.’